As Associate Ensemble for innovative opera company Téte à Téte, CHROMA provides the orchestra for its produced work and collaborates on participation and learning programmes alongside the productions. CHROMA is also actively involved in the annual Téte à Téte Opera Festival which showcases new works by opera practitioners.

Coming up next:

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival
4-21 August 2011
Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, London W6 9RL

Join Tête à Tête as we welcome a whole host of guest companies in our 5th Annual Festival of creation, invention, innovation, exploration and experimentation with the magical art form of opera.

Don't come if you love opera for its chandeliers and tiaras! This is gritty, hardcore, artists-at-work creativity where sparks will fly and hundreds of performers, directors, composers, librettists, designers, lighting designers, singers, instrumentalists, artists and other inspired individuals come together to take genuine risks hand in hand with discriminating, daring and forward looking audiences.

30 or so guests include a plethora of up-and-coming companies as well as: Scottish Opera workshopping their new piece for toddlers SensoryO; Glyndebourne Youth Opera exploring the phenomenon of wind in world premières by Orlando Gough and Hannah Conway; Welsh National Youth Opera chill the spine with The Sleeper by Michael Symmons Roberts and Stephen Deazley, and Opera North investigating new life with Toby Litt and Emily Hall's Life Cycle. Tête à Tête will also present works in development by Robert Fokkens, Michael Zev Gordon and Stephen McNeff, alongside a whole new set of Lite Bites performed all over the borough throughout the Festival

Circus Tricks
8-18 March 2012
Riverside Studios, Hammermsith London W6 9RL

Music: Michael Henry Words: Adey Grummet.
Directed by Bill Bankes-Jones, Designed by Tim Meacock

Circus Tricks is set in the spellbound, fleeting world of the circus, where laughter is tragic, tears are hilarious and wonder both wrenches the heart and makes it soar!

The knife thrower's assistant cannot stand the pain of her secret love for the knife thrower, an acrobat fights the world through the bottle, his brother struggles to catch him one more time, the trapeze artist is entranced by the pursuit of a single moment of weightlessness, the horse dreams of running in straight lines and the contortionist is just plain lonely.

And then there's the elephant...

Tete a Tete The Opera Festival - website

week 1 review 2010 Opera Festival

Tête à Tête - The Opera Festival 2010 - Week 1 review from Bill Bankes-Jones on Vimeo.

week 2 review 2010 Opera Festival

Tête à Tête - The Opera Festival 2010 - Week 2 review from Bill Bankes-Jones on Vimeo.

week 3 review 2010 Opera Festival

Tête à Tête - The Opera Festival 2010 - Week 3 review from Bill Bankes-Jones on Vimeo.

REVIEWS
2009 - Salad Days
As the winter sun sets early, delight in delectable singing and breathtaking dancing as Tête à Tête conjures up a magical park with this delicious musical comedy.(Critics Choice)

One after another the delightful songs flow past... do you get the impression that I enjoyed my evening? Gosh, yes. (The Times)

2008 - World premiere of Philip Cashian's first opera, "The Cumnor Affair", libretto by Iain Pears, based on his own novel on the Robert Dudley wife-falls-down-stairs mystery, "An Instance of the Fingerpost":
"This pacey one-acter is something of which the company can be proud" (The Guardian)
“Cashian’s skill is to mke the true mystery that of the human heart. His score, for CHROMA’s tiny ensemble of seven players, conducted by Tim Murray, is an electrocardiogram of Dudley’s heart, torn between a wife he loves and a Queen he adores.
Counterpointing his own long lines, first of ennui, then of impassioned mourning, is a sinister spooking of percussion, and a tense cross-hatching of violin, cello, flute and clarinet, as the courtiers William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham play out their own equally dark and complex loyalties.” (The Times)

“Much of the character is within the tiny orchestra (CHROMA, half visible throughout), with wind instruments carrying the mystery, percussion the menace" (Evening Standard)

2007 premières were six opera shorts, dubbed "Blind Date", a fun and warmly received presentation of what one audience member described as "opera for the YouTube generation".
The Observer:
“a hilarious tour de force”
“Monty Python's imperishable 'parrot sketch' now has a potentially immortal operatic rival.”
The Guardian:
“it is perfectly articulated and sizzles with invention”
The Stage:
“the evening is a feather in the cap of artistic director Bill Bankes-Jones”

2006 - "Odysseus Unwound" music Julian Grant words Hattie Naylor
"Julian Grant’s lyrical score has a timeless quality superbly played by the excellent CHROMA, who also sit on stage"
The Stage (on Odysseus Unwound, Oct 06)

Tête à Tête: www.tete-a-tete.org.uk

Artistic Director: Bill Bankes-Jones
Music Director: Tim Murray
Associate Ensemble: CHROMA
Associate Designer: Tim Meacock
Associate Lighting Designer: Mark Doubleday
Adminstrator: Anna Gregg
PR: SoundUK
Company Secretary: Caroline Steane
Consultant: Sarah Playfair

Chris Allan "Odysseus Unwound"

Susan Atherton, Damien Thantry, Stephanie Corley "Feathered Friend" music Helen Chadwick

Sybilla Meienberg watches over "The Cumnor Affair"